Social Media Can Improve Healthcare, But Are Doctors Holding Us Back?

by Houston Neal

Director of Marketing, Software Advice
March 04, 2011

“Tremendous.” A surprising word to come up in discussion about healthcare. But this is the word I heard several times in recent conversation on social media and medicine.

“Doctors have a tremendous opportunity to help patients online,” said Dr. Kevin Pho, better known as @kevinmd.

“If you look at [social media in] healthcare, the benefits to everyone are tremendous,” agrees Howard Luks, orthopedic surgeon and Chief of Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy at University Orthopedics, PC.

Putting these together, we might say, “social media has a tremendous opportunity to improve healthcare.”

But doctors have been slow to adopt social media. Why? Why aren’t they using social media to talk with other professionals, connect with patients and share information with the public?

The time commitment, concerns of liability, and naiveté are cited as major causes. But I think these miss the bigger picture. Social media is about more than the relationships between individuals. It’s about the dissemination of information. Information that can improve health care and save lives.

An Extension of the Exam Room
More and more Americans are going online to look for health information. Estimates are as high as 81%. While some argue this makes doctors less relevant, I think otherwise.

Social media allows doctors to extend their influence beyond the exam room. It allows them to share valuable information with patients, the public, and each other.

“Information is the new third party in the exam room,” says Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, attending physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. “We can influence information that our patients are reading. Doctors need to be part of the conversation to have a positive impact.”

Social media allows us to share information at a speed and distance that was once impossible. It presents a new opportunity to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases. In some cases, even save lives. But we still need more engagement from healthcare professionals. Doctors have an opportunity – and an obligation – to join us in sharing information online.

An Obligation to Use Social Media?
According to a survey from Health Dialog, only 25% of people searching for health information online verify the reliability of the source. This is disturbing when you consider the amount of inaccurate health information online, and that, according to estimates from Health Dialog, 58% of people will make a self-dianosis from it.

Take the report linking vaccines and autism as an example. Even though the research is fraudulent, parents still question whether vaccines can lead to autism. This confusion has been fueled by sensationalism on the Internet.

To reduce the amount of flawed information online, doctors need to share reliable resources, address misleading claims, and most of all, help patients understand the issues accurately. Twitter, Tumblr, blogs and the like are perfect channels for this. In the case of the vaccine-autism link, we could mitigate the false information in search results if more doctors used social media to engage with their patients on the issues that concern them.

How Do We Get More Doctors On Board?
The opportunities and obligations are clear, but if we want to see more doctors taking up social media, we need address some obstacles.

For starters, doctors need incentives to dedicate time to social media. We can’t expect a pediatrician working fingers to the bone to go home and start sharing web links. Altruism will only take us so far. We need modern medical coding that supports today’s tech- and web-savvy offices, and we need the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and other payers to get behind this.

As reported in HealthLeaders Media, the CMS acknowledges that, when appropriate, codes can be used to pay for time spent discussing a patient’s health conditions. They specify it must be a face-to-face encounter. Why not an online encounter? The CMS could offer reimbursements for communicating with patients online, through social media. At the very least, they should launch a demonstration project to test the viability of this.

In addition to overcoming time concerns, we need to overcome liability concerns. Many doctors avoid social media because they’re afraid of breaking HIPAA privacy rules. These concerns are mostly overstated, but until we address them, we’re not getting doctors on board. So, we need documentation. We need the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and healthcare organizations to establish guidelines on using social media. The rules aren’t different from other forms of communication – we just need to clearly define what physicians can and can’t say online. Here is a list of several hospitals that have developed participation guidelines. We need more of the same if we expect to assuage fears of liability.

Finally, we need training. There is a misunderstanding of what social media entails. How it works, how to create messages and posts, what to say in them. We need to educate doctors about the various tools and platforms available, and how these tools can come together to work for them.

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http://www.BocaConciergeDoc.com Steven Reznick MD FACP

I loved the article and the sentiment. Part of the problem is just the time involved. Between patient care, reading to stay current and family responsibilities time is an issue. Rea ding and communicating via social media is part of the cognitive services that general internists, family practitioners, pediatricians and all primary care providers have been fighting to be compensated for appropriately for years now.
I love it when my patients are well informed and bring me ideas and material to research. I encourage them to read the physician social media as well. this is a different type of reading than reading peer reviewed journals but it is productive as well. At least patients begin to understand the professionals thought processes and concerns in considering a decision or recommendation.
I doubt the Medicare Payment Reform group or RUC will encourage payment for communication on social media. That procedure oriented group protects their own.
http://healthcarecollaboration.com Ken Cohn

Houston, your points are well taken, esp incentives to learn new tricks

I would focus on engaging the GenX docs, helping them to see how use of these tools can help them acheive work-life balance

The Patient-Centered Medical Home fits well with the use of online tools to improve patient education and clinical outcomes

This is an exciting time to be in healthcare because physician leaders over the next 2 years will influence patterns of care delivery for the next 25 years
http://www.DocRate.net Angela N. Vance

I agree that traditional social networking has to be intimidating, due to privacy issues alone. I have been marketing to Physicians and Hospital administrators for years and the unified opinion is that everyone is willing, but would like to have a controlled environment, to do so.

That is why, last year I decided to take the database we have already created, personalize it to individualized fields of medicine, and allow for healthcare professionals (or groups) to create profiles and run them, similar to a facebook page.

I am still working out kinks, but we should have everything ready for market in a few months, which would allow doctors to send patients directly to their pages. The articles come directly from the AMA, Reuters, and other reputable sources, so there is no worry of any dangerous information reaching your patient base. You can also send mass messages, and interact with individual posts or assign admins to act on your behalf.

As for Medicare, do you recieve payments for return phone calls to patients? If so, maybe social networking can become an extension of those types of services. It does seem that this would be a similar situation. If I were handling it, that is the way I would go with it.
Puneet Arora

It is true that the doctors are slow to adapt social media for patient good and the major reasons have been given above. However, giving CME credits may not be the right type of incentive. The power of social media manifests itself in that it is democratic and without external incentives, one has to find his/her strong reasons to be a part of the online world. I also think “slow adoption” is not necessarily bad, as long as the “adoption” happens for the right reasons, drives the right behavior and is effective.
http://www.reachpatients.com CNH

Physicians will be most efficiently motivated by peers they respect who share their perspectives.

The good news is that most of those docs are willing to share what they know about useful tools like social media.

Here’s my response to Mr. Neal’s article – Motivating Doctors to Use Social Media.
http://UbiCare.com Bill Lindsay

Nice article, Houston. This is a complicated issue, especially for individual physicians grappling with time constraints, privacy concerns and lack of social media know-how. But healthcare institutions (hospitals, group practices, etc.) in particular have an opportunity to leverage social media to extend their influence through patient education and engagement.

For example, a hospital’s Facebook page can provide a connection to the hospital at all times, as well as an effective way for it to be seen as the trusted local source of reliable health information. But that’s only IF social media is used to deliver information that goes beyond the traditional push-marketing messages (events, fundraisers, community news) to serve patients’ real interests and needs. That’s a key way to extend influence, as you state, well “beyond the exam room.”
lsoliz

As long as Medicare and Insurance comopanies do reimburse for social media contact phycicians will not participate. They went too many years to school to not be reimbursed for their time. As it is we have too many patients that want their time for FREE! We have patients that do not feel they need to pay a simple 10.00 co-pay for comming in and asking some medical advise.